Thursday, March 27, 2014

Pak Peace Talks With Taliban: Is There A Method in Madness?

Sushant Sareen,

Senior Fellow, VIF

The more you think about it, the more it confounds: Pakistan
government’s peace dialogue with the Taliban. Look at it from a logical,
if also conventional, standpoint, and it appears as though the
Pakistani state has entered into a desultory dialogue with the Taliban
which will ultimately crash on the rocks of reality. It would, however,
be stretching the limits of incredulity to think that in reaching out to
the Taliban, the Pakistan government is utterly unmindful of the
pitfalls of dialoguing with the Islamist terrorists. Unless it is
somebody’s case that the current dispensation is only interested in
making its pile while serving out its time, there has to be some method
in the madness. There are broadly three, maybe four, possible
explanations – Simplistic, Delusory, Sinister and Labyrinthian – for
this madness of going out on a limb to hold peace negotiations with the
Taliban.

The simplistic explanation, one which is also quite common in the
public debate in Pakistan, is that this is merely a gambit. The Taliban
are being given a long rope with the conviction that they will
over-reach and make unreasonable and unacceptable demands. This will
pave the way for creating the elusive national consensus and provide
justification and legitimacy to launch a full scale military operation
aimed at eradicating their base, eliminating the bulk of their force and
expelling them from Pakistani territory. Swat is often held out as an
example where first a peace deal was negotiated and after the Taliban
breached the red lines laid down in the agreement, a massive military
operation was launched with the media whipping up a ‘national consensus’
in its favour.

The problem with ‘National consensus’ is that, more often than not,
it is something of a red herring. It is brought into play more to avoid
doing something rather than to facilitate some action. Swat operation
was, in this sense, more of an exception. The simple fact of the matter
is that forging a ‘national consensus’ on the question of a military
operation against the Taliban is practically impossible because the
naysayers are unlikely to ever come on board. There have been many
occasions in the not so distant past where the national mood appeared to
turn against the Taliban, but their supporters and sympathisers did not
switch sides. Their arguments might have not have got much traction but
yet they held on to them. The failure of the State to follow through
with the narrative it was trying to build, once again created the space
where the Taliban line started finding takers. What is more, if 50000,
and counting, deaths is not enough of a justification to launch a fight
to the finish against the Taliban, then merely reneging on an agreement
is hardly ever going to serve as a legitimate casus belli. Therefore,
the simplistic explanation isn’t robust enough to make sense of Nawaz
Sharif’s peace tack.

The delusory explanation started being peddled mostly by former
soldiers and their mouthpieces in the media after ‘targeted’ strikes
from the air by Pakistani forces in retaliation to terror attacks on
security personnel. According to this, the recent bombing runs by
fighter jets and helicopter gunships on Taliban targets (aided by
‘indigenous drones’ which, it is claimed, are equipped with intelligence
gathering capabilities comparable to US drones) have acquainted the
Taliban with the immense firepower that the Pakistani state will bring
to bear against them. This has forced them to sue for peace. The
purveyors of this explanation buttress their argument by pointing to the
stories of widening cleavages within the ranks of the Taliban between
those in favour of talks and accommodation with the Pakistani state and
those against having any truck with it. The Delusionists also claim that
not only are the Pakistani Taliban are not receiving any support from
the Afghan Taliban, they also fear that once the latter start
controlling territory in Afghanistan, they will be left to fend for
themselves. Another new element that is supposed to have injected a
sense of urgency among the Taliban to seal a deal are the reports of an
understanding having been reached between the Americans and the Pakistan
Army to act in concert for a ‘hammer-and-anvil’ operation against the
Pakistani Taliban. With an adverse politico-military situation looming,
the Taliban are doing the smart thing by trying to strike a deal on
favourable terms with the government. For its part, the government is
also keen to settle matters without having to use military force.

The trouble with the delusory explanation is that it is based more on
wishful and fanciful thinking rather than on hard facts and harsh
ground realities. For one, there is no real evidence that the Afghan
Taliban have either severed or are likely to sever their links with
their Pakistani associates. For another, there is no sign of war fatigue
among the Pakistani Taliban. They have neither suffered any
debilitating loss in the airstrikes nor do they have any dearth of new
recruits joining their ranks. If anything, their network, influence and
strike capability inside Pakistan has only increased. There is nothing
on ground to suggest any real squeeze on their finances. Most of all,
while there could be an element of self-aggrandizement motivating the
Pakistani Taliban leadership, the real driving force behind the Taliban
is the messianic and millenarian religious zeal to which no counter
narrative has been created. Casualties in Taliban ranks, therefore, are
only of academic interest and not of any real military value. It is
precisely for this reason that laying too much reliance on the efficacy
of airstrikes in bringing the Taliban to the talks table is akin to
missing the woods for the trees. Air power has been used by Pakistan in
many areas and there have been the usual bombastic claims of dozens of
casualties caused in these strikes, especially in Orakzai agency. And
yet, despite scores of air strikes, large parts of Orakzai remain out of
the control of the Pakistani state. As far as the North Waziristan
Agency (NWA) is concerned, the concentration of Islamist militias in
towns of the agency might have led to some initial successes in these
air strikes. But chances are that the Taliban would have already
adjusted to this tactic and taken counter measures.

Clearly then, if the Taliban are far from being worsted, either
ideologically or militarily, it follows that they have no pressing
compulsion to strike a peace deal with the authorities, unless of course
it is to gain some tactical advantage. A deal serves their purpose only
to the extent that it gets them time and space which they can use to
consolidate their control over areas they are holding, extend their
influence in new areas and sow further divisions in the ranks of their
adversaries who even today are split on how to deal with the Taliban.
With their allies, if not principals, the Afghan Taliban, expected to
establish their “Islamic Emirate” in at least the south and east of
Afghanistan post the ISAF withdrawal, the Pakistani Taliban will no
longer need North Waziristan as their ‘base camp’ (ironically, a term
Pakistanis loved to use for the state sponsored terrorists groups that
were operating in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir!). The Delusory
explanation, therefore, doesn’t hold much water and is only an exercise
in self-deception.

The Sinister explanation is that the peace dialogue is part of the
denouement, or if you will a wrapping up, of the double game that the
Pakistanis played after 9/11 against the Americans. In other words, this
is the endgame in the playbook by which the Pakistani military fought
its shadow war against the US-led ISAF in Afghanistan for more than a
decade. The corollary of this explanation is that what the rest of the
world saw as a blowback of the strategy of using terrorism as an
instrument of state policy was brushed aside by the top echelons of the
military and intelligence establishment as nothing more than collateral
damage, a small price to pay in pursuit of a larger strategic objective
viz. defeat of the US-led West and ensuring domination over Afghanistan
for purposes of achieving ‘strategic depth’.

Caught with a very weak hand after the 9/11 attacks, the Pakistanis
played along with the Americans but kept their jihadist assets intact.
As was to be expected, they couldn’t quite communicate or disclose their
game plan to all the jihadists. As a result they lost control of some
jihadists who felt betrayed by the ostensible shift in the policy of the
Pakistani establishment. Some of these terror groups ran amok and
turned their guns on their patrons. While the damage these people caused
was quite substantial, it also gave the military the plausible
deniability it so badly needed to successfully play this double-game.
The icing on the cake was that playing the victim not only allowed the
Pakistan Army to get away scot free, it also opened the floodgates of
economic and military assistance. Basically, the Pakistanis got their
cake and ate it too. Even though some of terror groups went ‘rogue’,
many of the main players like Mullah Omar and the Haqqanis understood
the intricacies of the Pakistan policy and were left completely
unmolested. The ‘rogue’ militants, a.k.a. ‘bad Taliban’, were
occasionally targeted when they over-reached or breached certain
red-lines. At the end of the day, however, the military establishment
considered many of these people as ‘misguided’ and therefore
‘redeemable’. Why else would the former ISI chief call the TTP Emir
Baitullah Mehsud ‘a patriotic Pakistani’ and the current Interior
Minister, Chaudhry Nisar, declare in the National Assembly that
‘majority of the Taliban were not enemies of the country….most of their
groups had no animosity to the state of Pakistan’.

Now, with the Americans on their way out, the time has come to fold
up the game and the dialogue with the Taliban is part of that process.
The idea is to settle the matters inside Pakistan and use the Islamist
storm troopers for the purpose they were created – the conquest of
Afghanistan. To be sure, there will be some recalcitrant groups who will
not accept the overtures of the government. These outliers will be
ruthlessly eliminated; all others will be accommodated. If this
‘sinister’ explanation has any substance, it means that notwithstanding
all the doomsday day scenarios being painted by analysts and observers
within and without Pakistan, the Pakistani establishment still has a
reasonably firm grip over the situation and is now on the cusp of
achieving a great victory over the West.

The biggest trouble with this explanation is that it assumes that the
genie can be put back into the bottle. The Taliban have got a taste of
power as well as a sense of the weakness of the Pakistani state. There
is every chance that their ambitions and their objectives have far
outgrown the role that the Pakistani establishment had reserved for
them. More importantly, just as the Pakistanis played a double-game with
their American patrons, the Taliban could well be playing a similar
double-game with their Pakistani patrons. If indeed this is the case,
then the dialogue will not go very far and its breakdown will be the
beginning of the unravelling of the Pakistani endgame.

The final explanation is quite Labyrinthian in its scope and
character. The dialogue is a big gamble that Nawaz Sharif is taking not
for any other reason but for the simple fact that there are no good or
viable options on offer. It is a long shot aimed at gradually bringing
things back to normal and snuffing out the Taliban threat to the state
with patience and perseverance in order to bring a paradigm change in
the objective conditions that gave rise to or added fuel to the flames
of jihadist activity. Elements of this argument that follows have been
made by various people in responsible positions in Pakistan, but no one
has really articulated it in a structured manner.

The bottom line of this argument is that the Pakistani state is in no
position to defeat the Taliban, militarily or ideologically. Launching a
military operation against the Taliban will not solve the problem
because it won’t win the peace. Rather it will enmesh the military in a
quagmire which will only worsen the existential crisis of the state. The
dilemma is that while the Pakistani state cannot fight, it also cannot
give up without a fight, a fight that in any case it is unlikely to win
in a meaningful way. Therefore, it is imperative to think of an
alternative strategy, which has an outside chance of working, albeit in
the medium to long term, and the dialogue is a critical part of this
strategy. There are two components of this strategy. The first component
applies to the trans-Indus belt i.e. FATA and to an extent Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa and Pashtun areas of Balochistan; the second one applies to
the cis-Indus belt i.e Punjab and Sindh and to an extent the Baloch belt
of Balochistan.

In FATA and other pockets of the Pashtun belt, a new reality has
emerged in the form of a new elite that has arisen by force of arms and
by killing most of the old elite – Maliks, Sardars and Elders. Most of
this new elite never counted for much in the past because they belonged
to the lower and lower middle class. Someone was a driver, someone a bus
conductor, chair-lift operator, gym instructor, tailor, iron-smith etc.
But as Taliban commanders and cadres, they have become empowered. Their
ideological motivations aside, this new elite cannot be wished away,
much less exterminated. The emergence of this elite is not a new
phenomenon. In this turbulent region, every time there is
destabilisation or unrest, a new elite emerges. When the British moved
into this area, a new leadership emerged from among those who resisted
the British – some of them going on to form their own Kingdoms, Swat
being one example. The British accommodated these people and worked out
an arrangement with them under which they were given titles, subsidies
and privileges in exchange for accepting a loose control by the Raj over
these areas. There were occasions when some Tribesmen would get restive
and the Raj responded with punitive expeditions. The rules of the game
were however accepted by both sides. The arrangement worked until the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the entire region got destabilised
and the old system broke down.

Through the dialogue with the Taliban, the Pakistan government is
probably recognising the new reality and adjusting to it. As far as FATA
is concerned, Pakistan has always had a ‘one country two system’ model–
the normal Pakistan law did not apply to FATA which is still governed
under the Colonial FCR. There is therefore no reason why the same model
cannot be tweaked by making the TTP and other sundry Islamist warlords -
the new Maliks and Sardars in the areas they control and putting in
place a legal framework that satisfies their Islamist agenda. In other
words, impose Shariah (the Taliban version) in the areas they control.
Alongside put in place a system of subsidy to bribe and buy these people
and give them an incentive to limit themselves to these areas. There
will be howls of protest from the liberals in Pakistan, but they can be
ignored since they are now merely a fringe group. With the Afghan War
2.0 winding down, the withdrawal of the foreign forces will remove the
casus belli which according to many Pakistani analysts lit the fires of
jihad.

A radically different approach based on massive development
programmes will be followed in rest of Pakistan. To a great extent,
this can only work if the first component of the strategy is successful.
Assuming that FATA settles down and violence levels are significantly
reduced, Nawaz Sharif thinks he will be well placed to usher in a burst
of economic activity by attracting foreign investment, providing an
environment for domestic investment to pick up and getting huge amounts
of assistance from friendly countries. The Economic Corridor project –
rail, road and pipeline network from Gwadar to Xinjiang funded by the
Chinese – is part of this plan, as are the power plants, industrial
parks etc. which are being envisaged. While Asif Zardari planted the
idea of a ‘Marshall Plan’ of $ 100 billion to pull Pakistan out of the
rut in which it finds itself, Nawaz Sharif hopes to be the person who
actualises this idea. Senior ministers are bandying figures ranging from
$20-$50 billion of investment in the next five years. Already the
Saudis are opening the purse strings and have ‘gifted’ $ 1.5 billion to
Pakistan. There are reports that other Gulf states are going to follow.
The multilateral financial institutions – IMF, World Bank, ADB and IDB –
have also opened the tap of funds. The Americans might not give much
post 2014, but they are indicating that they will facilitate the flow of
funds. The Europeans are also making encouraging sounds with the
British taking the lead in pumping in money. The Chinese are busy
signing MOUs on a variety of projects (though it must be said that most
of the MOUs that the Chinese have signed in the past haven’t really
taken off). The Japanese are showing interest in funding some mega
projects.

If all this money starts flowing in, Nawaz Sharif calculates that it
will provide such a massive fillip to economic activity that it will
keep the people occupied gainfully and profitably and wean them away
from being attracted to Jihad. This is a narrative that Pakistanis have
often sold to the gullible West, which has readily lapped it up without
ever questioning why even when the Pakistan economy was doing well the
people were attracted to radical Islam. Be that as it may, once the
cis-Indus region starts booming, it will naturally start having an
impact on the trans-Indus region and slowly but surely the Pakistani
state will be able to turn things around, extending the writ of the
state in areas where it has vanished and at the same time moderating the
extremist ideology which has taken root in many sections of society.
There would of course remain those elements who, intoxicated by Jihadist
fervour, might suffer some withdrawal symptoms and need their jihadist
fix. For them, the Nawaz Sharif government could find new battlegrounds –
Syria being one possibility, Kashmir being another and hotspots around
the world where these guys could peddle their jihadist wares. As for the
rest of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif could always bring in legal and
constitutional ‘reforms’ that conform to the Islamic laws that many of
the mullahs are demanding.

The way Nawaz Sharif would see it, this plan is the best shot he has
under the circumstances. Given that the policy menu that is on offer has
only a series of bad options ranging from outright surrender to total
war, this labyrinthian approach is probably the best of all the bad
options. If it works, there is a very good chance that all will be well;
if it doesn’t, then what will happen is something that would have
happened in any case without this plan. But clearly, there are huge
problems in this plan which raises serious doubts about its ever
working. The first problem is that it doesn’t take into account the
nature of the beast, i.e. the Taliban or the radical Islamists. These
people cannot be confined to a small geographical area where they can do
what they feel. By definition, they see the world as their playground
because Islam, according to them, cannot remained confined to man-made
borders. Therefore, it is natural for them to export their brand of
Islam beyond the areas they control. Second, the assumption that the
government can buy and bribe its way out of this problem is quite iffy.
The Taliban have no dearth of money even now. Their smuggling,
kidnapping, extortion rackets and the charities that fund them generate
enough for them to keep going. Then there is the ever present danger of
demands arising from rest of Pakistan to impose the same Islamic system
and the cosmetic or even substantial ‘reforms’ that Nawaz Sharif might
bring in to appease them will never be enough because competitive
Islamism will come into play. Finally, Pakistani policymakers and
analysts often brush under the carpet the inconvenient fact that
Talibanisation of FATA did not start post 9/11 or even around 2004 when
the army moved into the area.

While radical political Islam made an entry as a result of the Afghan
war against the Soviets, Talibanisation started soon after the Taliban
captured Kabul in 1996. Inspired by the success of the Taliban, small
groups started erupting all over FATA declaring themselves to be local
Taliban. Many of these groups later coalesced under the umbrella of
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. Therefore, merely the exit of the foreign
forces isn’t going to remove the fundamental cause that gave rise to
this phenomenon, even less so considering that the Afghan Taliban are
expected to start holding sway over large swathes of Afghanistan. The
fact that the Taliban successfully resisted the most powerful military
force and forced it out will serve as a shot in the arm of their local
affiliates. What is more, if indeed the Taliban control all or parts of
Afghanistan, they are unlikely to forget the unstinting support that
their associates in Pakistan gave them. Nor are they likely to forget
the treatment many of them received at the hands of their Pakistani
intelligence handlers.

Elements of all the four explanations outlined above would probably
be factors that would be guiding the stock that Nawaz Sharif has placed
in the store of a dialogue with the Taliban. At the same time, he would
also be conscious of the problems and pitfalls that lie in the way and
the very real possibility that despite his best efforts to avoid an
outbreak of hostilities, the Pakistani state might have to wage a war to
the finish with the Islamists. If things start spiralling out of
control, Nawaz Sharif will probably opt for targeted and surgical
operations in the first instance. But these are unlikely to help very
much one way or another in stopping the haemorrhaging that is pushing
the Pakistani state towards complete collapse. At the end of the day, if
the Pakistani state, as it is currently constituted, has to survive, it
will have to bring out all the elements of its national power to launch
a ‘Total War’ on the Taliban, and the sooner the better because the
more the delay, the more difficult it become to win this war. The big
question is whether it is already a little too late.